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I am glad you brought up yesterday's caller. After he posed the question I thought I would not have a problem with another group or organization taking a public stand and camping out. I believe that the caller was intimating that the left would not be tolerant of a public display by persons whose politics are felt to be socially antithetical (right to life, gun advocates, hate groups). I think he projected his opinion that demonstrations should not be tolerated. I believe in free speech and would not want riot police to remove those gatherings pre-emptivly. Did this person forget that the "tea party" gatherings were left alone by the riot squads despite the presence of weapons in the crowd?
I have great concern that the OWS movement has attracted a violent fringe or has been infiltrated by individuals planted to discredit the movement. Individuals whose philosophy includes violence and/or property destruction gravitated toward activist movements since these groups take public stances and such people find no welcome in the formal political structure that they wish to dismantle. These issues bring to mind the events in San Francisco when ex-Supervisor Dan White's trial verdict for the murder of Mayor Moscone and Harvey Milk. The gay community came out that evening to protest the tragic verdict. The newspapers the next day had a photo of the violence of the demonstration. The photo showed a male in a black leather jacket smashing a large glass door of a business alongside the path of the march. I soon learned that I knew the man in leather jacket who was captured in the photograph. In his stoical circle he proudly recounted his activities that night and who took credit for the destructive attack on property. In our community there was great comfort and openness with everyone's sexual identities/preferences or even confusion and he was not a gay man. He was a self professed radical anti-establishment activist that had an affinity to public demonstration. For this person the protest march was both an opportunity and the perfect cover to act out his violent political view. He was not a gay activist but a radical political opportunist that became the media face for the "violent discontent" of the gay community. The reporting medial promulgated the notion that this violent "poster child" was the face of discontent in the gay community and representative of the sentiments of the outraged community. This political opportunist played into the hands of those politicians and law enforcement officers who opposed the growing political power in the community and sought to discredit the gay community by showing proof that the community was comprised of social deviants,
The occupy concept has been a success but there are more ways to skin a cat than sticking it's head in a boot jack and pulling on it's tail.
There is no dumpster large enough or tight enough to contain thought.
A change is as good as a rest and the 1% has no patent on creativity.
The months and weeks that have been allowed in tents and sleeping bags coast to coast turns up as testimony to unification of grievance against corruption across the board, police, protesters, and mayors alike. Celebrate.
Tug O’ War: Libertarians and ProgressivesColumn by new Root Striker Brian Anderson.Exclusive to STRNearly one year ago, Ron Paul and Ralph Nader appeared on “Freedom Watch” to announce a “libertarian-progressive[1] alliance.” At first I was extremely skeptical; libertarians and progressives are polar opposites when it comes to the idea of positive... http://www.strike-the-root.com/ To the So Called 53%
Original article
"One of the corporate establishment’s favorite tricks for countering dissent is fake populism — dismissing as “class warfare” any critique of genuine privilege while misdirecting the working class’s resentment toward the underclass."
... Here are people with multiple jobs and underwater mortgages, struggling to survive while falling all over themselves trying to outdo each other in absolving the Mr. Moneypennys and Daddy Warbuckses of any responsibility for their plight. It’s like watching a dog that keeps crawling back on its belly to lick the boot of the man who’s kicking it...
http://c4ss.org/content/8942
The two links above are illustrative of what progressives have in common with the Libertarians (and even tea partiers). We all need to focus on what we have in common. The establishment loves to keep us divided amongst ourselves, least we band together in opposition to against the establishment.
United we stand, divided we fall!
I have been waiting so long. I have hope for a nonviolent revolution. "Joy to the world! Joy to all the boys and girls! Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea! and joy to you and me!" Sing it! Dance it! Paint it! Learn it! We are living!
Palindromedary, I am not too sure what you meant:
"Well, Cygnus, that video was funny! But I'm not so sure that the victors are any different than the "defeated" and are likely plotting to do it again...this time in America."
But I do know who runs Washington, D.C. and that is AIPAC, the Lobbyists who work on behalf of Israel. I remember when Obama was not yet President, and told the people that "lobbyists were not going to rule the White House when he became President!," (paraphrased) yet even before he became elected his Presidency had been well compromised and when he sat in the White House, he surrounded himself with people whose allegiance was not to the United States, not to Germany, but to Israel. Why does Israel's foreign policy always become the foreign policy of the United States? Because Israel uses U.S. soldiers to fight it's ill conceived wars for itself. What benefit is it to these United States of America if these United States of America attacks Iran, now that the IAEA has been well compromised? The only benefit from all these wars lies in Israel's hands. If Syria goes under then Israel will step in take the water rights and hold hostage the Arab nations to the north. - Cygnus1
Thom:
While these are all good reasons for Occupy, I don't think you answer the caller's question as to whether there is a right to occupy "public lands".
I would argue that there is a right to occupy public lands on two bases: 1) These are public lands, occupiers are part of the public, and as such have a right to use such lands, especially in the committing of public political acts such as demonstrations, protests, etc. --- occupation is a public political act; and 2) The First Amendment, which you have cited and quoted on occasion.
Thanks.
The police in the several cities where the people were forcibly evicted from the Occupy sites are guilty of conspiracy to commit aggravated assault on innocent people who have been attempting to do dothing but exercise their Constitutional rights to free speech and assembly. Whatever violence committed by occupiers was done by infiltrators and instigators trying to discredit the Occupy movement. The police departments have admitted their conspiracy.
It will become stronger. The people are waking up. The city confiscated a 5,000+ volume library that had been amassed at Zucotti Park. It will be not only retrieved, but augmented. Knowledge is the beginning of power.
I can't believe how close to the median income I am. I gross $480/wk (the median works out to $507/wk, a difference of less than 6%), and I actually lost money in a couple months this year. I live a fairly Spartan life, alone in a 1-bedroom apartment. I don't have a DVR, an iPhone, or an HDTV. Almost every thing I own was a gift, and I rarely buy luxuries. But I may not be able to afford to replace my 18-year-old car when it finally dies.
I realized eventually that I lost money in one month because I gave to Democrats' campaigns, so I don't regret it. I'll donate more in January and July.
What are we fighting for? And how can the fight remain relevant?
Right on, Louise and Thom Hartmann!! That's exactly right!
I watched a truly amazing movie last night called Amazing Grace made in 2006. It was about an 18th century English politician who fought for the abolition of slavery. What I heard sounded very much like what is now going on with the Occupy movement. The same push from the so called privileged class which was in favor of profit over human lives. Seems that nothing changes and the people of this planet have had to constantly stand up for and fight for our God given rights to equal treatment. We are constantly fighting for the right to live with dignity and some measure of comfort. The politican's name was William Wilberforce and he was a member of the privileged class in England at that time and he changed things. It took time, but he did it. He went on to fight for human rights until the end of his life. I endorse this movie as one of the most inspiring I have ever watched and give it 5 stars.
Seems to me, when viewing history, that everytime the people win, we settle into a complacency and then they plot to slowly take away our rights and every time when a tipping point is reached, we fight back. I don't know about anyone else, but I am personally very tired of this constant battle to retain human rights.
I think the courts should become clogged with lawsuits entered by anyone injured or unlawfully arrested by the police. A blizzard of cases would be a good way to put this moment in time in the permanent record. Or, there could be Wall Street Walkers who clog up the sidewalks every day and make it a slow tedious journey to navigate anywhere in the business district. They could even dress like executives and no one would know who was whom.
Interesting that what passes for the top story on the national news is the imoral deads of one child molester when we have hundreds of people with good and honorable intentions being beaten bombed and robbed of their belongings and their rights by the police who used to be there to protect and serve. THis is a sad state of affairs and we better make sure the 99% get stronger we better join them and take our country back from the rich heartless 1% who stole it.
It will be (D) voters who will, on Tuesday, November 6, 2012, evict all the ideas, ideals, and principles that OWS is struggling for.
It's the function of the corporate party's liberal "progressives" to ensure that either none or the least possible change for good occurs.
Voter Consent Wastes Dissent:
http://chenangogreens.org/home/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id...
"There's a pair of testicles somewhere between the Capital Building and the White House that fell off the president after Election Day [2008]," said Davis, an Air Force colonel who spent two years as the chief prosecutor of Guantanamo military commissions, during an interview at his Washington, DC, office over the summer and in email correspondence over the past several months. "He got his butt kicked. Not just with Guantanamo but with national security in general. I'm sure there are a few areas here and there where there have been 'change,' but to me it seems like a third Bush term when it comes to national security."
Davis is "hugely disappointed" that Obama reneged on a campaign promise to reject military commissions for "war on terror" detainees, which human rights advocates and defense attorneys have condemned as unconstitutional.
"What happened to that guy?" Obama "has now embraced and kissed on the lips the whole Bush concept [of military commissions]. He failed to keep a single promise he made in that speech."
Davis resigned in protest in October 2007, because he said Bush administration officials politicized the high-profile military commissions cases of alleged 9/11 conspirators and al-Qaeda members he was gearing up to prosecute. Turning his back on the military commissions process ended his military career. He was denied a meritorious service award because he was told he served dishonorably by speaking out about the tribunals.
Davis continued to publicly oppose the military commission process after his resignation and, more recently, he has also criticized the Obama administration for refusing to hold accountable key Bush officials who implemented a policy authorizing the torture of "war on terror" detainees.
"I did at one time have tremendous confidence in the military commissions and the people who were selected to preside over the process," Davis said. "But it was politicized by the Bush administration who had no respect for the rule of law."
Davis said. "Here you have an administration lecturing countries like Iran and Libya on human rights. How do you, with a straight face, lecture other people when we do the exact same thing? We're great at preaching but not practicing."
Obama established a "terrible precedent" by stating publicly that he was only interested in looking "forward," a decision that has "undermined whatever moral authority we had left," Davis said.
http://www.truth-out.org/former-guantanamo-chief-prosecutor-pair-testicl...
I wish he had compared crime rates of those who were spanked as children vs those who were not. I studied this issue in the late 1970s/early 1980s and discovered that adults who were NOT spanked as children were about 98% less likely to become involved in the criminal justice system than were adults who were spanked as children. Hmm...I'm just sayin'
Well, Cygnus, that video was funny! But I'm not so sure that the victors are any different than the "defeated" and are likely plotting to do it again...this time in America.
Hilarious Message from Bank of America
Palindromedary, there is history and then there is history written by the victors and the whole world better buckle under. Hope everybody enjoys this video. - Cygnus1
IBM and the Holocaust is the stunning story of IBM's strategic alliance with Nazi Germany -- beginning in 1933 in the first weeks that Hitler came to power and continuing well into World War II. As the Third Reich embarked upon its plan of conquest and genocide, IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s.
Only after Jews were identified -- a massive and complex task that Hitler wanted done immediately -- could they be targeted for efficient asset confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, enslaved labor, and, ultimately, annihilation. It was a cross-tabulation and organizational challenge so monumental, it called for a computer. Of course, in the 1930s no computer existed.
But IBM's Hollerith punch card technology did exist. Aided by the company's custom-designed and constantly updated Hollerith systems, Hitler was able to automate his persecution of the Jews. Historians have always been amazed at the speed and accuracy with which the Nazis were able to identify and locate European Jewry. Until now, the pieces of this puzzle have never been fully assembled. The fact is, IBM technology was used to organize nearly everything in Germany and then Nazi Europe, from the identification of the Jews in censuses, registrations, and ancestral tracing programs to the running of railroads and organizing of concentration camp slave labor.
IBM and its German subsidiary custom-designed complex solutions, one by one, anticipating the Reich's needs. They did not merely sell the machines and walk away. Instead, IBM leased these machines for high fees and became the sole source of the billions of punch cards Hitler needed.
http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/
Why did the US not come to the aid of Jews in the death camps when they could have? Why do you think?
"War Against the Weak is the gripping chronicle documenting how American corporate philanthropies launched a national campaign of ethnic cleansing in the United States, helped found and fund the Nazi eugenics of Hitler and Mengele — and then created the modern movement of "human genetics."
In the first three decades of the 20th Century, American corporate philanthropy combined with prestigious academic fraud to create the pseudoscience eugenics that institutionalized race politics as national policy. The goal: create a superior, white, Nordic race and obliterate the viability of everyone else. How? By identifying so-called "defective" family trees and subjecting them to legislated segregation and sterilization programs. The victims: poor people, brown-haired white people, African Americans, immigrants, Indians, Eastern European Jews, the infirm and really anyone classified outside the superior genetic lines drawn up by American raceologists. The main culprits were the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune, in league with America's most respected scientists hailing from such prestigious universities as Harvard, Yale and Princeton, operating out of a complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. The eugenic network worked in tandem with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the State Department and numerous state governmental bodies and legislatures throughout the country, and even the U.S. Supreme Court. They were all bent on breeding a eugenically superior race, just as agronomists would breed better strains of corn. The plan was to wipe away the reproductive capability of the weak and inferior. Ultimately, 60,000 Americans were coercively sterilized — legally and extra-legally. Many never discovered the truth until decades later. Those who actively supported eugenics include America's most progressive figures: Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Sanger, and Oliver Wendell Holmes who ruled on the infamous Carrie Buck trial and declared "three generations of imbeciles is enough."
American eugenic crusades proliferated into a worldwide campaign, and in the 1920s came to the attention of Adolf Hitler. Under the Nazis, American eugenic principles were applied without restraint, careening out of control into the Reich's infamous genocide. During the pre-War years, American eugenicists openly supported Germany's program. The Rockefeller Foundation financed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and the work of its central racial scientists. Once WWII began, Nazi eugenics turned from mass sterilization and euthanasia to genocidal murder. One of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute doctors in the program financed by the Rockefeller Foundation was Josef Mengele who continued his research in Auschwitz, making daily eugenic reports on twins. After the world recoiled from Nazi atrocities, the American eugenics movement — its institutions and leading scientists — renamed and regrouped under the banner of an enlightened science called human genetics."
http://www.waragainsttheweak.com/
Just thought this little bit of information would be something we should all read. - Cygnus1
Quote:
UPDATE: JUSTICE LUCY BILLINGS has been "thrown off" the case as court administrators prepared to "randomly" choose a new judge. (one who does not follow the Constitution. - Cygnus1)
Who is ordering the cops to refuse a court order? Three guesses.
Despite an iron-fisted shut down of overpasses to block protest signs here at APEC on Oahu, Asia has heard the people of the United States cry out that they will no longer pay for US Government mistakes or Wall Street's crimes.
As a result, Asia will buy no more US debt, and is openly worried about repayment of the debts they currently hold. Obama's insults to China show that he has thrown a tantrum, and desperate to borrow more money, he has to show the rest of the world that the people of the United States are chained down and unable to refuse to pay for the costs of Wall Street's Mortgage-backed Securities fraud, the biggest financial swindle in history, which is what has brought the global private banking network to the edge of collapse.
As this defiance of a court order demonstrates, the rule of law is ended in the USA. The police are being given orders to really start beating up the protesters before more of the world's financial centers realize that the US Government cannot make good on its promise, made and demonstrated during the S&L Bailout of the 1980s, to always have the taxpayers cover Wall Street's losses.
Sadly, we are entering a very bloody time in the nation's history, with the government willing to spill the people's blood to protect Wall Street's gold." end quote Source www.whatreallyhappened.com
The U.S. Military when they see how their loved ones and friends are being treated then watch them SUIT UP. - Cygnus1
You know that it would be quite a sight if the masses overwhelmed the police, stripped them of their uniforms, and other accoutrements, and maced those suckers in the face and see just how cocky these bastards are then. It would be funny to see these disgraced poppycocks dancing around in the streets in their undies. There is strength in numbers...the numbers just have to realize that they can do a lot more than just take the blows and mace in the face from these silly Barney Fifes of NYC. Golden showers might not be too far out of line as well. Now I'm probably getting too far out of line here...it's scaring me. Back in the box...back in the box!
Of course, it is easy to say that democracy eventually won out when the majority of people were won over...translating this into votes..when voting actually mattered..in the days when corporations were not ruled by the supreme court to be people....and when politicians were not as owned by Wall Street as they are now.
The ruling elite believe that the people are lazy, spoiled, whiny, and not worth worrying about because they believe that they will eventually get tired and frustrated and, with a little bit of police brutality, will get discouraged and crawl back under their makeshift shelters under overpasses. Of course, with the people not pushing back, physically, to meet the physical attacks from the police, why wouldn't the ruling elite believe otherwise.
They believe that many of the people still believe in the system of democracy, corrupt as they have made it, and that they will be yet again voting for the same false hope that they voted for last time.... which made it possible for the gains they have made without much of a fuss from mainstream America.
At least back in the 60s there was some little trepidation on the part of politicians in respect to what the people thought. Now, a voter's gullibility in the system is an inside joke among the leading politicians and the ruling elite.
Back in the 60s, the financial system was not so wracked with magic money, CDOs and CDSs and other derivatives that so overwhelms the national wealth that there is just no hope for a sound system left anymore.
Back in the 60s, despite the wasteful war of lives and treasure in Vietnam and the constant and ominous threat of total annihilation by the Soviet Union, men were still able to feed and cloth their families and seek medical attention for them when they got sick, take vacations, and put their children through school...all on the sole breadwinner's wages or salaries. Compared to the way things are now....and yet to be very shortly...we would all have been better off if the bombs wiped us out.
At least it would have been a quick death. We could have all died with the belief that the enemy was over there and not over here...by our own people, a few of which got lucky, or criminal, and hit the jackpot and continued to ply their gambler's, or criminal, vices using other people's money (our life's savings...retirement money..for many)...reaping the profits when the bubble kept rising and bullying the owned politicians into bailing them out when the bubble popped.
At least the 60s had seen the last of the 20s and 30s and those banksters and industrialists had to give a little back in order to buy a little insurance that some anarchist's bomb wouldn't wipe them out physically. Back then they needed the people on their side to fight the threat of Communism.
During the 80s, they got over that (no more threat of the Soviet Union and the ideology of communism) and went whole hog for the jugular of America's middle class and poor. They had the media and propaganda on their side and people swallowed the belief that the good life was here to stay. All they had to do was keep believing and keep super-sizing that house and, of course, that mortgage....oh, and put all your money into investing for the long term. This became increasingly hard to do as the corporations kept squeezing the working man..then working women (because the income of a single breadwinner was no longer enough).
Of course, it was not only the fear of the voter, that helped politicians assent to relief for the destitute workers of America but it was also lots of violence that made these obscenely opulent ruling elite not hog quite so much. As they held their noses and snorted obscenities at the lowly creatures who were making the rich man even richer, they vowed to drown these social programs in a bathtub. Their half-brain-dead zombie Ronald Reagan was just the smooth talking actor that they needed to play the part, and beguiled Americans out of their hard won fight against selfish and greedy maggots and cockroaches who thought they were more deserving than everyone else in America.
So, now, it's really too late to change anything politically and the power is too entrenched with the banks that there really is nothing left but that which we all hoped would never have to happen. But it's either that or the airliner crashes into it's target. It will be a slow, agonizing death for most of us...and a shameful one because we will always feel like we could have done something that really would have changed things for the better. We could have saved ourselves. It will be a holocaust of magnificent proportions and all some of us will have done was screech about voting for the slick tongued lying devil who screwed us once and will screw us yet again once he gets our votes.
To quote Gerald Celente from your Free Speech TV program: "State controlled Capitalism is called Fascism." And, over 5,000 books destroyed is another reminder of history... This action will only energize the Movement...